Many of the audience in the session confirmed, when asked, that they used the Oracle SOA suite but did not use AIA. The session started with an explanation of the AIA Foundation Pack. In short a jump-start for your integration project, reduce integration risks to end up with lower costs.

The customer reference Navistar explained that they came from a classic integration spaghetti landscape. But turned this around with the help of AIA Accelerators: development standards, repository templates, error management, service constructor, AIA design patterns.

What I liked about the session was that Navistar explained they created a model (read: Visio sheet) to visualize the components they had in their landscape. Regarding components you can think of a different set of adapters, the service bus, b2b, bpel, owsm, etc. This visual model was used to design every integration interface. In all it’s quit simple, but I liked the idea of making it visual for both business and developers. After all one clear picture can tell you more then many words.

1315-1415 – Building a Shared-Services Infrastructure with OSB (15583)

The session was focus around a discussion panel for the Oracle Service Bus product. The session was mainly divided in 3 parts. First a general introduction about the members and background of the panel. Second a panel discussion and third a crowd question opportunity. My oppinion the first section took way to much time. I personally was not that interested in the client background further then a general architecutre overview and the positioning of the OSB. The panel discussion however was very, very good. You can notice that the quality of questions was high and it set the bar high for the upcoming crowd sections. My opinion, which I shared this night at the #soacommunity event with Deb, was more time for questions and less introduction.

Questions varied from high-load best practices, scalability and the positioning of the OSB product at the reference clients.

Very nice presentation which was given from the cloud. About the cloud, from the cloud. :)
I was already familiar with the Vordel product since a client (a utility company in the Netherlands) already implemented the product before the whole Oracle Enterprise Gateway deal was official. The session handled some use-cases showing the positioning of the OEG product within a x-as-a-service implementation (meaning a environment where part is placed outside the traditional corporate network).

First use case shows a college where AD authenticated users need to access external hosted email (Google Apps). Mark drills down in the trust mechanism and shows the concept of SAML and vital API keys.

Second use case is Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) where the interface to manage (start/stop/etc) elastic cloud infrastructure instances is secured.

Third use case is Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) where a giftcard company makes it internal services public for platforms as Facebook. Usage of REST which has no official open standard for security as SOAP has with WSS, so adoption of the Amazon Query API.